Ivan has very rarely seen Byerly in any honest state of distress. The closest he could come would be when he thought everything had gone pear shaped as hell with Dono, and this matches it, only there's less foaming and visible fretting. Which isn't reassuring in the slightest. Ivan blinks at the request, and and then looks down at the bundle at his feet.

There are things that Ivan generally avoids. Overbearing women who don't want to sleep with him, angry husbands, young Vor women seeking commitment, his mother, and dead bodies. He's relatively sure the first four aren't applicable here, which just leaves the last one. And that last one, Ivan is proud to say, he's avoid for most of his life, despite a career in the Service thanks to his highly valued position of manning a desk. He is not going to let Byerly Vorrutyer ruin a perfectly good streak.

"Absolutely not," he says, not caring if he's jumping to conclusions and it's just a regular carpet Byerly is keeping in the snow, with weird bumps that could, if you squinted, be something other than an object of roughly human proportions. "Where did you even get that?" Wait, no. "Nevermind, forget I asked."